SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle CTO Larry Ellison said his company’s new security weapon better protects companies, which are “losing the cyber war.”

The cloud-based security system uses machine learning to manage and protect data, Ellison said during his second keynote at Oracle OpenWorld this week. Two days earlier he announced the company’s new autonomous database.

The new security product monitors and analyses applications, infrastructure, and all types of log data across a company’s architecture, and “provides complete visibility across all compute areas,” Ellison said. This includes on-premises workloads as well as those running in a public or private cloud hosted by Oracle or any other provider.

“The Oracle Management Security Cloud manages anyone’s technology, no integration required,” Ellison said. “We unify the data, we analyze the data, we detect the anomalies, and we automatically mitigate. And it integrates with your existing enterprise management system. You don’t have to rip anything up. It detects threats in real-time and can automatically mitigate them."

The system is “highly automated,” but it’s not fully autonomous like the new database, which patches itself.

“While the database is completely self-driving, we’re not quite there yet on our cyber defense system,” Ellison said. “It’s more automated than anything else, but it’s not fully autonomous. It does work in conjunction with human beings to protect your data.” This means users decide what — and what not — to automate. For example, the system can automatically reset passwords, or a security analyst can manually do this.

The goal is to eventually run a fully autonomous security system, which Ellison said better protects companies because it eliminates human error and system downtime. “We need new systems. It can't be our people versus their computers. We’re going to lose that war. It’s got to be our computers versus their computers. And make no mistake: it’s a war.”

The security system followed several other cloud announcements made at the company’s annual conference in San Francisco. These include new networking, compute, and storage features Oracle added to its public cloud that it claims can improve compute performance by 87 percent compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Photo: Oracle CTO Larry Ellison demonstrated machine-learning based security at Oracle OpenWorld.